"I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city."

A number of phrases in Dubliners suggest the narrowness and limits against which the characters struggle. An ever present "channel of poverty and inaction" (p. 35) often leads to a life of "commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness" (p. 33). In many of the stories, husbands feel "savage and thirsty and revengeful" (p. 88), while wives "after a quarter of a century of married life [have] very few illusions left" (p. 156). Trapped by alcoholism, sexual repression, and poverty, Joyce's citizens cannot summon Gallaher's energy to "revolt against the dull inelegance" of the city (p. 68). When characters make an effort to escape their conditions, they often end up in prisons of their own making. This kind of dead end is best illustrated by the fact that the book is framed by the death of a priest in the first story, and the death of a childhood sweetheart in the last.

Joyce establishes the thematic significance of paralysis on the very first page: "Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis" (p. 1). From Eveline's hesitation about running away with her lover to Bob Doran's entrapment in marriage, Joyce's characters usually are incapable of taking decisive action to improve their lives. At the conclusion of these stories, we are often left wondering how much of a character's plight is due to the milieu Joyce so specifically illuminates and how much is due to human qualities that transcend environment. Faced with religious intolerance and political inefficacy, it might be far easier to submit to paralysis than to fight a losing battle like that of Mrs. Kearney in "A Mother."

However, Joyce's portrait of Dublin is not entirely bleak. The sympathy he shows for Stephen Dedalus as well as Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses finds its beginnings in Dubliners. Joyce could simply have condemned Dublin, as Gallaher does, or followed the example of Duffy, who, in "A Painful Case," seeks refuge in brittle, lonely seclusion. But Joyce chose the more challenging course of grappling with the inherent ambivalence of exile, confronting and accepting the loss of the "dear" in "dirty Dublin."

To present this range of feeling and attitude, Joyce casts a wide net, arranging the stories so they move from childhood to adulthood and from public to private. In his thoroughness, Joyce is as tender as he is fierce. The first Dubliners we meet are curious children hungry for adventure and love. There are young boys with romantic visions of chivalry and young women longing to escape. While youthful dreams quickly fade for the adults in later stories, Joyce shows us that their defeat is not unavoidable. Characters like Mr. Kernan in "Grace" and Farrington in "Counterparts" help to create their own despair. But Joyce's focus on community calls us, in turn, to ask what strength we can find together in the places we call home. Moreover, Joyce invigorates Dublin with the poetry of his prose, "falling faintly . . . and faintly falling" (p. 225), like the snow at the end of "The Dead," upon all of the city's inhabitants, elevating their condition by virtue of his art.